State repression led to incidents of resistance, such as the Tambov rebellion (1920-1921), the Kronstadt rebellion (1921), and the Vorkuta Uprising (1953); the Soviet authorities suppressed such resistance with overwhelming military force. During the Tambov rebellion Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in the area) allegedly authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. (According to witnesses' accounts, chemical weapons were never actually used.[2]) Prominent citizens of villages were often taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender.[3]

The contemporary caption says "YCLers seizing grain from kulaks which was hidden in the graveyard, Ukraine, 1930." At the height of collectivization anyone resisting it was declared "kulak"

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms (Russian: колхо́з, kolkhoz, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927 and was becoming more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.[6] As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill Stalin gave his estimate of the number of "kulaks" who were repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported.[7][8]

In Soviet Union, political repressions targeted not only individual persons, but also whole ethnic, social, religious, and other categories of population.

Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers"; deportations of nationalities; labor force transfer; and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union).

The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 was severely aggravated by the actions of the government of the Soviet Union, such as the confiscation of food, the lack of meat, planned delivery limitations that ignored the famine, blocking the migration of its starving population, and the suppression of the information about the famine, all of which prevented any organized relief effort. This led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area.[11] The overall number of the 1932-1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is variously estimated as 6-7 million[12] or 6-8 million.[13]

In the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, repressions and the mass deportations were carried out by the Soviets. The Serov Instructions, "On the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia", contained detailed procedures and protocols to observe in the deportation of Baltic nationals. Public tribunals were also set up to punish "traitors to the people": those who had fallen short of the "political duty" of voting their countries into the USSR. In the first year of Soviet occupation, from June 1940 to June 1941, the number confirmed executed, conscripted, or deported is estimated at a minimum of 124,467: 59,732 in Estonia, 34,250 in Latvia, and 30,485 in Lithuania.[18] This included 8 former heads of state and 38 ministers from Estonia, 3 former heads of state and 15 ministers from Latvia, and the then president, 5 prime ministers and 24 other ministers from Lithuania.[19]

The exact number of victims may never be known and remains a matter of debate among historians. The published results vary depending on the time when the estimate was made, on the criteria and methods used for the estimates, and sources available for estimates. Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of the Soviet history. For example, the number of victims under Joseph Stalin's regime vary from 642,980 to 61 million.[5][21][22][23][24][25]

Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who deeply studied this problem, considers that 66,700,000 people became victims to state repression and terrorism from 1917–1959.[26]:375 An analogous figure of over 66 million people was announced by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, the chairman of the Commission for Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression.[26]:375, 376 According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights every way.[26]:373 No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents.[26]:378 The difficulty of this method is that the required data are diverse and are not in one archive.[26]:378 They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics.[26]:378 Where, for example, can one determine the number of people shot in the second half of the 1930s and in the early 1940s in the Kurapaty hole (estimate for them is from 30–100 thousand people or by some estimates, up to 200,000 people)?[26]:378 Only in Belarus.[26]:378 The same can be said of other mass shootings and other forms of repression of victims of Soviet regime.[26]:378

By the request of N.S. Khruschev in February 1954 a report about the number of repressed people was prepared and signed by General Prosecutor (Attorney General) of the USSR R. Rudenko, Interior Minister of the USSR S. Kruglov, Justice Minister of the USSR K. Gorshenin. The report listed the total number of people prosecuted for counter-revolutionary crimes during the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954. During that period the Collegia of OGPU, NKVD Troikas, Special Council of the NKVD, Courts and Military Courts indicted 3,777,380 individuals, including 642,980 who received the death penalty, 2,369,220 with sentences of up to 25 years, and 765,180 exiled or deported. At the time of the report, it further stated, there were 467,946 people in the labor camps and prisons convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes and 62,462 former prisoners in exile.[27]

Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions (День памяти жертв политических репрессий - October 30, since 1991), in former Soviet republics (except for Ukraine, which has its own annual Day of Remembrance for the victims of political repressions by the Soviet regime on third Sunday of May). Members of the Memorial society take active part in meetings.[citation needed]